Use JFK Carrier

My family’s farm in Surry County is one of several that the proposed landing field would take over.

In “Navy moving forward on landing strip,” March 31, Adm. Gary Roughead said, “We have to have a place where pilots can fly that best replicates the environment that they are going to experience at sea.”

The Navy wants the landing strip placed in a remote area where pilots can fly in and out in near total darkness, but still close to Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach.

On March 24, the Daily Press ran a story about the decommissioned aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy (“Carrier Kennedy now sits idle in Pa.”). The Navy cannot decide what to do with it. It sits in Philadelphia harbor where it was modernized in the mid-1990s for $600 million.

Instead of spending $250 million on a remote landing field that residents do not want, it seems much more logical to put this aircraft carrier to use. It could be towed out to sea and used in near total darkness as the admiral suggested.